Bit of a rubbish week this week, sorry about that. Still, in a few weeks time you’ll be wishing for some respite from the constant wave after wave of gaming discounts flying in your face from all angles. The Steam Thanksgiving sale should start next week, which was pretty epic last year, and after that it’s going to be Christmas sales all round. For your constantly updated guide cheap games, head to SavyGamer.co.uk.BioShock 2 – £7.49/€9.99/$9.99/920 MS Points
The phenomenal relaunch of MSGFWLGOD continues it’s run of success with this 10 month old game being discounted to slightly cheaper than it has ever been anywhere else. Stop the presses. I seem to recall that Bioshock 2 uses SecuROM DRM, but can’t find any mention of what DRM any games from MSGFWLGOD include, there is just a generic DRM statement for all games. Honestly, to convince me that MS have any real interested in pushing the PC platform forwards, I’d have needed to see a much bigger commitment than this. Considering that Microsoft haven’t published a PC game since they have had DirectX 10, and by extention Vista to push, but in the same time they have paid dozens upon dozens of developers to not make PC games, this feeble effort seems token at best. If you’re quick, you can also get Bioshock the first for £1.49/€1.99/$1.99/180 MS points (today only).

And Yet It Moves – Pay What You Want (or is it?)
Recently launched indie centric digital distributor “Yawma” were having a pay what you want sale for And Yet It Moves, even letting you set the price at zero if you wanted to be super penny pinching. Seemingly the bump in traffic caused a server meltdown, and the web site has been down since I checked last night. They’re giving updates over twitter, and saying that if you want to get the game, you can try emailing them at “games@yawma.net”, and they should be able to “get you hooked up”, which presumably means give you a copy of the game for what you want.Update: They have said that they’ll be back up later today, and have extended the PWYW sale. Check the homepage and twitter for updates.

Ubisoft bundle – £53.07/€61.98/$84.83
Just what I’ve been waiting for, a bundle on these exact 17 games. Wait, that’s not true at all! I’m not sure exactly who GOG is aiming at with these mega bundles of 10+ games. It seems to me that some kind of scaling discount would make more sense, since I would have thought very few people would actually want every single game. At current pricing, buying 13 games costs more than getting all 17. Still, it’s not a bad bundle, from the days when Ubisoft didn’t mind you playing your games without having a constant connection from your pc to their MEGASERVERS. Simpler times. The selection includes:
Beyond Good and Evil
Chessmaster 9000
Driver: Parallel Lines
Far Cry
Heritage of Kings: The Settlers
Heroes of Might and Magic
Heroes of Might and Magic 2: Gold Edition
Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete Edition
IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946
Might and Magic 6-PACK: Limited Edition
Panzer General 2
Panzer General 3D Assault
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Settlers 2: Gold Edition
Silent Hunter 2
Ghost Recon
Rainbow Six
And each game can also be had individually for £4.37/€5.11/$6.99. Get Games also have BG&E for just £2/2/$4, but I gather that GOG has applied fixes to make it play nice with modern systems.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadows of Chernobyl & Call of Pripyat – £6.25/€7.30/$9.99
The same pair and price that has been offer elsewhere previously, but it was such a good deal that it’s worth posting again. Here you get what are generally considered to be the best two stalker titles in one cheap bundle. We’ve already established that Jim loves the stalker games lots and lots, and you can find a bunch of text that confirms that here, and I certainly enjoyed what I’ve played of Shadows of Chernobyl, but am yet to dip my toe into Pripyat.

Deal of the week
Grand Theft Auto IV [Complete Edition] – £6.25/€7.30/$9.99
This is the mega open city shooting driving cut scene game, plus both chapters of DLC, for a very reasonable price. It’s actually cheaper to buy this than the DLC on its own has ever been, so if you already have the base game, but are eager to try out the extra downloadable episodes, then this is still worth your attention. Watch out for the massive download size though, it’s roughly 16Gb to download. This deal is available right now, but ends at some point in the next 24 hours, so be quick.

This is a deal of the week on the Ubisoft North America store, and is priced at the usual £9.99 on the UK store.

To get this deal in the UK you just need to do the following:

1. Go to http://proxify.co.uk
2. Enter the following URL: link to emailus.ubi.com
3. Search for ‘Assassin’s Creed’ on the UbiShop homepage and select ‘Assassin’s Creed’ ‘PC Download’ which is about halfway down the page.
4. Should display price of $5. Just check out as normal from there.

Also, Impulse has the excellent Tropico 3 for a mere £3.25, Hearts of Iron 3 for £4.49 and Grand Ages Rome complete for £4.99. You can also get the complete Gal Civ 1 and Lightweight Ninja for 62p each.

I really do like Sword of the Stars. It’s an excellent space 4X with less focus on economics and more focus on using the lovely huge tech tree to build your own space ships to command in big dramatic battles. Lots of events and subtleties to keep things interesting. Surprisingly excellent background fluff.

Totally agree. Lovely game. Still finding new techs I like.
Really looking forward to telling my ships to go under, not over, enemies though, which I hear is going to be in SOTS 2. Human ships always seem to go over, which is stupid as their bellies have no bloody guns on them.

You can use the square brackets (“[“) to order the ship to spin, which lets it bring it’s guns to bear above or below (humans tend to have most of their firepower on their broadsides). Only thing to note is while performing the rotation the ship won’t make any other manoeuvres, so it’ll plow into anything in front of it. Although you can use this to force ram enemy ships if you time it right; always fun to watch a dreadnought smash through a destroyer swarm.

Do you think someone (me) who didn’t get on too well with GalCiv II will like this? I like what I hear about Sword of the Stars being more about space combat than economics, is it af fair comparison to say it is to GalCiv what Total War is to Civ?

mcnubbins: “…is it a fair comparison to say it is to GalCiv what Total War is to Civ?”

I think that’s perfectly fair. Turn based 4X star conquering with detailed real time space battles. Economics is mostly a couple of simple sliders and building trade ships. The real meat is designing clever ships using well directed research and then getting to watch them blowing things up in lovely detail. Or getting blown up, as the AI is actually rather good and understands the tech tree quite well.

The ship design interface deserves a special mention for being easy to use but giving lots of powerful options. Using the right techs for the right tasks is a satisfying and tricky challenge.

Echoing that Sword of The Stars is pretty great, and well worth owning if you like 4x games at all. If you remember how it felt/played when it first launched, just go bash your head against a wall until you forget, because its really is a whole different game now, and old grudges will only taint what is otherwise a very, very enjoyable experience.

It’s just a pity that the developers behind it seem to be one of the most bizarrely egotistical and hard-headed teams in existance.

4x games =explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. basically any game like Civilization, Galactic Civilizations, Space Empires, Sword of the Stars, ect. is a 4X game. they are not all space strategy games but most are.

I don’t know what SotS people have been playing, but mine had the worst combat control and camera in the whole galaxy and the clunkiest galaxy map control to match it.
(Is there any kind of fix/mod around for this? Both for combat and the map. It makes my head explode in frustration every other minute. Non-2D scrollable galaxy maps just do not work very well..even if it’s 3D you should give it an option to stick angles.. And combat should have some measure of overview and control.)

SotS also stripped everything that was pure OCD geek joy out of the 4X genre.
Yet oddly people seem to think this is a good thing (3 sliders instead of researching/building stuff removes around 80% of what 4X was/is).

I peeked into Armada 2526 compared to SotS and liked that better.
Still have to try Distant Worlds, of which I read many great things.

From what I remember of SE IV it beat the pants off of SotS imho, and MOO and MOO2 via GoG will still give all of these such a run for your money, it’s not even funny.

Luckily it bodes very well. It means the sale is going to be extended!

We’re in the process of upgrading our servers a substantial amount, and we’re going to redeploy the site on Wednesday to make sure we can handle the load. The PWYW sale will be extended another day so that no one is left behind.

I’ll be sure to post here when we’re live. Also, like Lewie said, my email is free game for anyone with any questions. games@yawma.net.

Fallout: New Vegas, Digital Collector’s Edition (which as far as I can tell mean it includes an e-novel), is $35 at the US Direct2Drive. I really dug the game, and the recent patch has fixed some of face-to-keyboard problems. And there are already some good mods.

@Graham: Apparently you can use the coupon “Load15″ to get 15% off any title over $30, so it’s actually $29.71 for Fallout: New Vegas.

Also worth noting that it should register on Steam — you’re only getting the serial number off of Direct2Drive, really. Though I imagine that “D2D Exclusive” novel will have to be downloaded from D2D if you want it. The game also seems to only be available to the Americas from the US site, which is where the coupon works.

@Lewie: I haven’t been paying too much attention (I haven’t finished Oblivion yet, and the GOTY will be out by the time I do), but I don’t think anywhere has had much of a sale on boxed copies yet. Best Buy is scheduled to have a Black Friday sale price of $39.99 for it, which suggests it hasn’t been too cheap lately. On the other hand, everyone’s kind of given up on PC games at retail; last year Best Buy’s Black Friday PC games were duplicates of the year-before’s, with an extra $2 taken off. This year I think Fallout: New Vegas is the only PC game they’re offering and it’s the same sale price as the console versions. Online, Amazon has it for $46 and I don’t think GoGamer has had a sale on it yet; that’s about it for online sources with good prices, as far as I know.

My experience has been that US retail rarely has bargain pricing for PC titles anymore. I’ve certainly not seen New Vegas for less than MSRP of $50. Even Amazon, who I’ve begun relying on for bargains on console games, almost never even acknowledges the existence of the PC when it comes to sales (sometimes they’ll discount something from 8 years ago, but that’s about it) and rarely includes the PC version in preorder credits, release date shipping promotions, or similar. There’s a reason the digital distributors are taking over.

Yeah, it’s still full price at US retail. PC game prices don’t drop nearly as quickly here as they do in the UK, hence the frequent confusion on our part when UK posters here talk about how much cheaper retail games are than on Steam.

@Skull: Well, the D2D page does list it as being a bundle of two separate products, GTA4 and Episodes, rather than one single product. Except if you click through to their pages, you won’t be saving much even if it turns out to be separable. GTA4 is a 13.8 GB download by itself, and Episodes is a 14.96 GB download by itself. Which would make sense since it would have to be the standalone version if it was separate.

If it is all one big download, at least you can console yourself with the knowledge that all the GTA4 radio stations will be available in Episodes, which isn’t the case with the standalone Episodes and is otherwise only possible with the GFWL DLC versions of the episodes.

Thanks for the response guys, Mac does seem to be right and you can download the Episodes seprately. GameSpy Comrade recognises that GTA IV is indeed installed on my PC. This is such a large downlaod though and with my internet connection it will be a week before I get these episodes. Hopefully they are worth waiting for!

yea what carra said, 16gb is 1/5 of my house’s monthly bandwidth allowance, my parents watch a lot of video on iPlayer, and my brother is a big downloader too, so its all too easy to go over the 80gb limit.

@Ziv: If I recall correctly, last year (I think the first time they had a thanksgiving sale) Steam’s sale started on a Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving) and ran through Sunday / ended Monday morning (5 days of 24-hour specials). Except I think they started it Tuesday evening and so had Wednesday’s special deals up for 36 hours or so.

So if it follows last year’s schedule it will run from the 24th (though actually start on the 23rd, with no change in specials until the 25th) and run through to the morning of the 29th. But I might be misremembering some things or confusing some details with the Christmas sale.

hey, HEY!
Have a question.
how does GTA4 run? Is it still the bug-ridden, broken-as-can-be-on-the-technical-front piece of frame-killer-for-no-good-reason that it was when it launched? Or have they patched it up nice and propah?
And do I need to sign up for all of the following: rockstah club, GFWL and steam?

It’s weird when it comes to GTA4. I ran it with admitedly low frame rates but almost no technical issues fine, unpatched, from release. On a notebook. A notebook with 4GB of RAM, sure, but still a notebook.

I think the fuss around it was never justified. It wasn’t the most optimised game ever, but it ran fine on all three of the machines I tried it on – ranging from fairly new gaming machine, to 18 month old gaming machine, to the notebook.

The patches apparently fixed it to run better, but I was already bored of it by the time they brought the patch out. Worth taking the risk though, IMO. You’ll have to at least make a dummy GFWL and Rockstar Social Club accounts, from memory.

I played GTAIV on console, so I can’t comment there, but I did try the second DLC on PC a few months back when it was cheap. It ran extremely poorly even after extensive tweaking, and crashed frequently. I can’t recommend it. You can get it to run, but doing so is such a pain that, if you’re like me, you inevitably find you’ve lost the will to play it by the time it’s actually working.

Ah, the “GTA IV PC is a terrible port that runs like crap” nonsense again. It did have major problems at release, but those are long gone for most people. Runs smooth as butter for me, looks much better than on 360, and plays better to boot.

the amazing avernum 6, both eschalon books, gothic 2, spellforce 2 and an awesome variable percentage on theatre of war 2 kursk 1943 (I get 80% off on this, not sure where it starts at the lower end though, maybe 50%. 80% is £3.40 which is just an awesome deal for this game)

Direct2Drive has a “price match guarantee” until December 31. If you buy something from D2D but spot a cheaper price at a “qualified competitor” (only Steam, Gamersgate, and Gamestop.com), D2D will refund you the difference as store credit.

Anyone who likes Steam prices but would rather shop at D2D (and doesn’t mind mucking around with Support tickets) should keep this in mind.

The end of 2 is far better than the end of 1. It’s got better gameplay at the reduction of not being nearly as pretty or novel. Still a great game with a good story, but it doesn’t have that flair the original had, not until the closing act anyway.

Wow, great deal, but if I go to gamesforwindowslive.com I just get an error. “Could not log you out.” I don’t mean it’s in the corner of the site or anything; it’s all I see. That’s astounding. The third iteration of this store, and they still manage to fuck things up so bad they produce something I’ve never even seen before: a site that just flat out tells me I can’t use it, with no option to log out. Amazing.

I know I can probably screw with cookies or lower security settings or something, but frankly, even 10 cents isn’t a good enough price to make me want to deal with this mess.

Does anyone know how one goes about backing up a game purchased through GFW? Is there even a mechanism for it?

I have to say, this AoE3 experience has impressed me, as it was presumably designed to. Easy purchase, fast download, and no client required to run the game itself. Give me a good backup option G4W, and I might have to start buying things from you. Hell, do that and you’ll be well ahead of Steam in my book.